In Washington, DC, on Wednesday, academics and policy wonks warned US Congressional representatives about the perils of inscrutable algorithms, a red flag entangled by tangential worries about privacy, data collection, and net neutrality.
As framed in a letter submitted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, democracy …

My iPhone 6 recently upgraded itself to iOS 11. And guess what – it's become noticeably slower. This is no surprise, of course, as it's the same on every platform known to man. The new version is slower than the old.
It's tempting to scream "code bloat" but that's not necessarily fair because new stuff usually has extra …

Relying on search engines to find answers to coding problems has become so common that two years ago it was suggested computer programming be renamed "googling Stack Overflow," in reference to the oft-visited coding community website.
But researchers from Virginia Tech contend more care needs to be taken when copying code from …

WebKit, the open source project behind the rendering engine that powers Apple's Safari browser on macOS and iOS, has urged web designers to embrace "the notch," though not everyone is happy about doing so.
Apple's forthcoming iPhone X has a notch because a portion at the top of its screen has been given over to what the tech …

Oracle plans to accelerate the pace of Java SE releases – and has moved Java EE's code repository to GitHub in keeping with its avowed desire to step back from managing the beast.
Java SE has been on a two-year release cycle. That's no longer fast enough, according to Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle’s Java platform …

Among developers, Python is the most popular programming language, followed by C, Java, C++, and JavaScript; among employers, Java is the most sought after, followed by C, Python, C++, and JavaScript.
Or so says the 2017 IEEE Spectrum ranking, published this week.
IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the The Institute of …

Amid renewed calls to regulate AI before it wipes humanity from the planet, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has rolled out a standards project to guide how AI agents handle data, part of a broader effort to ensure AI will act ethically.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and a few other companies, over the …

Analysis
Elon Musk – the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, not to mention co-chairman of OpenAI and founder of The Boring Company – is once again warning that artificial intelligence threatens humanity.
In an interview at the National Governors Association 2017 Summer Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island on Saturday, Musk insisted …

Samsung's Tizen appears to have more holes than a screen door, but the mobile operating system, which powers Samsung watches, TVs, and a few phones, may not be as disastrous as it seems.
It does look bad. According to Andrey Karpov, founder and CTO of Program Verification Systems, the Russia-based maker of static code analyzer …

Microsoft describes Visual Studio Code as a source code editor that's "optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications."
In fact, VSC turns out to be rather inefficient when it comes to CPU resources. Developer Jo Liss has found that the software, when in focus and idle, uses 13 per cent of CPU capacity …

The rush to improve system functionality is leading developers to knock out subpar code, posing a threat the security of major systems around the world, according to an extensive report.
The software quality of financial applications is worse than that of those in telecoms and retail, according to the report.
The study ( …

Miserable software developers produce miserable software, to the further detriment of organizational productivity and personal health.
Researchers from the University of Stuttgart, University of Helsinki, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have completed a study [PDF] of …

Google on Wednesday introduced an open-source project called Grumpy to translate Python code into Go programs.
The company's front-end server for YouTube and its YouTube API are mainly written in Python, and run on CPython 2.7, as opposed to other implementations (Jython, PyPy, or IronPython).
The issue for Google is …

A leading education advisor to government ministers in the UK has criticised the aggressive proliferation of software in schools as a "gimmick", and called for ministers to "drain the swamp".
British schoolchildren will play Minecraft for an hour as Microsoft's contribution to the global "Hour of Code", a stunt intended to …

Radbot
Every company has its ups and downs. Those downs could be exploding phones or a sudden unmovable overstock of Clinton merchandise (or conversely an uptick in Trump-the-statesman t-shirt demand). Bigger organisations can better absorb the illness of a member of staff or a surge in demand beyond all expectations, although no one …

GitHub Enterprise is scheduled to get a version bump on Wednesday that will bring code reviews, project organization, and workflow visualization capabilities.
Introduced in 2011, GitHub Enterprise provides Git version control on GitHub, on premises, or via private cloud, with a variety of bells and whistles that matter to …

Some people are making very bold claims about what DevOps can deliver. Here’s one: “High-performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster,” according to the first bullet point of the 2015 annual Puppet Labs State of DevOps report.
With …

If you want a brief summary of DevOps, it goes like this: a lot of those who claim to be implementing DevOps aren't getting it right. And British companies are doing worse than their peers abroad.
That’s the potted findings of a CA Technologies earlier this year that claimed there exists a gap in perception, pointing out that …